crispyambulance

  > After 3 hours I was just exhausted...

I got a feeling that the 4 hour Musk documentary is going to be a similar kind of experience, exploring in extreme detail all the myriad ways that guy is an asshole.

I wonder if there's a way for "targets" of CBP to easily maintain phones that can be toggled between their "real work" profile and some boring anodyne "CBP-safe" profile?

Locking/disabling the phone, I think, only creates suspicion as we've seen in a previous case not long ago. But if phones can have a cloud back-ups, shouldn't it be possible to have TWO different "back-ups" that can be chosen at will?

The thing that's really disturbing is not how far Cambridge Analytica actually got in terms of influencing American voters through the "campaigns" they were hired to perform. In the end it was hard to assess how much damage they did.

But that's not the real problem here.

The problem is that it has been demonstrated how ad-tech infrastructure can be re-purposed for political propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. All of that power is now available to the highest bidder, and the infrastructure providers, as we are now know are utterly amoral, stronger and faster than any government regulations, beholden to their shareholders and nothing else even if the world burns.

   > Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used...

Disinformation was used and it is NOT a "potential issue" that merely "elevates" the matter, it's profound offense that requires a harsh and comprehensive response.

I think subway rail systems do have "real live location", but whether that information is consistently provided to public distribution for use through apps is a question mark.

I suspect most systems are a mix of your platinum, gold and silver (and kidding me).

Transit telemetry is inherently spotty on these public-facing applications.

If it's like other systems, it will resort to transit schedule estimations when data is missing and then try to sync as live data becomes available.

   > My TVs are on the IoT network so that I can control them from Home Assistant, but they're blocked from accessing the internet. NS lookups are redirected or blocked (53 redirected to my local DNS resolver, 853 blocked),[...]

That's great, good for you that you can do that.

Unfortunately, from LG's surveillance capitalism point of view, the 0.001% of LG owners that can even think about doing that isn't even a drop in the bucket. They don't care about any one individual, and the vast majority of individuals don't care or understand what LG is doing as long as they can watch TV.

It's only a matter of time before another Cambridge Analytica situation pops up, except with better tools and vastly more data. Or maybe something we can't even imagine yet enabled by simply re-purposing ad-tech into something political and malevolent? Some people will be wise to it, of course, but if enough are caught up in it, it won't matter, we all lose as a whole.

  >...vocation of choice is misaligned with your personality...

I also kind of sense this.

The OP mentioned they were doing systems engineering. That's a very particular hellscape of grinding details. It involves being comfortable constantly dealing with a lack of control and flow. The good news is there many different kinds of work. I hope they can find their path.

It really depends on what the individual goal actually is.

I think engineering curriculums “stop short” on mathematics just as it starts becoming interesting, more generalized and before connections start becoming easy to see and remember. Math is often handled as a bag of tricks.

A lot of engineers would do well to review mathematics at a deeper level than their undergrad days, and that can mean hitting up real analysis, abstract algebra and other topics from scratch in a proof theoretic way.

Once that mathematical fluency is achieved, it becomes possible to ingest other topics at higher levels of sophistication, IMHO.

XML was a good, well-intentioned idea.

The problem, IMHO, was that rampant "xml-abuse" in the naughts. ws-* standards and over-engineered garbage like SOAP ("complex object access protocol") made people loathe XML.

I did like JAXB in Java, XLST, schemas, XPATH. Never got into XSL, but it seemed like good thing too. It worked best when your tooling manipulated it for you or at least helped you in an intelligent way. Much of the hate for XML came from situations where you had to deal with someone's over-the-top-one-size-fits all schema without the benefit of tooling to at least hint you in the right direction.

It still survives in WPF and c# *.proj files. If it were just me, I would still use it for object serialization. But json is king now even though it's inferior.

   > I really do not think it’s a difficult language to learn.

Neither do I, but there's huge distances between "spend-an-afternoon-intro-on-it" and "learn-it-well-enough-for-occasional-work" and "learn-it-enough-to-build-serious-databases".

Of course, everyone in HN is "advanced" so what do I know!

    > You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon.

Oh, HELL NO!

It's an ugly little language that one has to come back to and re-learn over and over at different levels of sophistication. Nothing wrong with that, but to suggest it's trivial is a gross mischaracterization.

Beautiful!

I did have in mind something more like the Socratic method, asking pointed questions of your mentee, guiding them but not pushing them. I suppose that in a weird way that essay is the Hunter S Thompson idea of the socratic method.

I really do think it's important to give thought to HOW to give help.

Especially in the technical communities, there's such an over-emphasis in "asking correctly". It perhaps started with usenet (think Eric S Raymond's INSUFFERABLE FAQ on "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"), and ended with the persnickety and now thankfully moribund stackoverflow gameified and toxic question-and-answer forum.

There is plenty advice around for "how to ask" (really, it's the same if you know the person or not). It all boils down to a Calvinistic "show you're worthy" kind of exercise.

But what about advice for giving help to someone?

There's plenty of ways that giving someone help can go horribly wrong, and I think that it's not uncommon for people to be blindsided by such a request.

> ...it's massively expensive to buy the components piecemeal.

I think the point of this is not to make "a product". It's just a fun project that you can build yourself or participate in some way with it's creation and/or funding.

It's not practical. That's OK.